Improving Efficiency for Your Front Desk Employees

Success in your medical practice is reliant on keeping your patients and staff happy. Efficient workflows for your front desk employees will help reduce wait times, beat burnout, and improve your patients’ overall experience. Automating tasks whenever possible is a great way to create a more efficient workflow for front desk staff, allowing them to work smarter, not harder. At DLM, we help medical practices improve their efficiency using simple digital tools.

How Efficient Workflows Help Retain Employees

After you have hired an all-star team for your medical practice, it’s important to focus on employee retention. Efficient workflows can go a long way to prevent employee burnout. One of the biggest contributors to burnout is an unreasonable workload. If your staff is too busy with mundane tasks, it’s easy for them to become overwhelmed and start searching for work elsewhere. Reducing the number of unnecessary tasks for your staff and creating efficient workflows will reduce stress and keep your staff feeling their best at work, improving your overall retention rate.

Using Technology to Automate Front Desk Tasks

Several common front desk tasks can be automated using digital tools. For example, our IRIS Conversational AI can be used to connect with patients who want to schedule appointments using convenient text messages, send automated appointment reminders, and more. This means less time spent answering the phone or making potentially unnecessary calls for your staff. Using IRIS Conversational AI, your front desk staff can wait to respond to messages until it is convenient, allowing them to prioritize their workload during busier hours.

Similarly, automated email drip campaigns can be used to connect with patients without much oversight from your staff. By completing the contact form on your website, patients can be automatically enrolled in email campaigns with valuable information before their appointments. These emails can be tailored based on a patient’s procedure of interest or other considerations. This saves your staff time before they reach out to schedule the new patient’s appointments.

Automation Improves Patient Experience

It may seem that automation removes the personal connection from your patients’ experience with your medical practice, but the opposite is typically true. Automating processes for scheduling and other tasks frees up additional time for your front desk staff to connect with patients when they are in your office. By spending less time on the phone, your staff is free to share a conversation with patients in your waiting room and create a more personal experience. By reducing staff workload and stress, they will feel more relaxed and friendly with patients in person, improving patient experience overall.

In addition to an improved in-office experience, automated communication means that patients spend less time waiting to hear back from your staff or are on hold. This goes a long way to improve their overall experience with your practice, increasing your overall patient retention.

Call DLM to Improve Your Efficiency

To learn more about improving your medical practice’s efficiency through IRIS Conversational AI, email automation campaigns, and more tools, contact Digital Limelight Media. You can call (616) 222-3735 or contact us online to schedule a 15-minute demo.